An Illustrated Chronology of How We Understand the Universe

Einstein famously observed that the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it's comprehensible. In The Physics Book: From the Big Bang to Quantum Resurrection, 250 Milestones in the History of Physics, acclaimed science author Clifford Pickover offers a sweeping, lavishly illustrated chronology of comprehension by way of physics, from the Big Bang (13.7 billion BCE) to Quantum Resurrection (> 100 trillion), through such watershed moments as Newton's formulation of the laws of motion and gravity (1687), the invention of fiber optics (1841), Einstein's general theory of relativity (1915), the first speculation about parallel universes (1956), the discovery of buckyballs (1985), Stephen Hawking's Star Trek cameo (1993), and the building of the Large Hadron Collider (2009).

As the island of knowledge grows, the surface that makes contact with mystery expands. When major theories are overturned, what we thought was certain knowledge gives way, and knowledge touches upon mystery differently. This newly uncovered mystery may be humbling and unsettling, but it is the cost of truth. Creative scientists, philosophers, and poets thrive at this shoreline. --W. Mark Richardson, 'A Skeptic's Sense of Wonder,' Science

Pickover takes a wide-angle view of what physics actually is, encompassing everything from relativity to quantum mechanics to dark matter and beyond, in a spirit that honors the American Physical Society's founding mission statement of 1899, which holds physics as "the most basic and fundamental science." As much as it is about the great ideas of physics, the book is also about the great minds behind them, including Brain Pickings darlings Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, and Erwin Schrödinger.

From the magnetic monopole to quasicrystals to dark matter, The Physics Book is an invaluable treasure trove of curated knowledge in an age when, as Andrew Zolli put it at the opening of PopTech 2011, "the scale of our knowledge is expanding faster than most of our ability to comprehend." For once, it's rather nice to make some of humanity's greatest intellectual achievements feel contained and digestible.